


Ouroboros

by RiverDelta



Category: Steven Universe (Cartoon)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Human, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-31
Updated: 2016-12-31
Packaged: 2018-09-13 18:14:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,302
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9135679
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RiverDelta/pseuds/RiverDelta
Summary: "Is writing fanfic supposed to be this depressing?"





	

I sat there, staring at my Macbook Pro, the one I used to write up essays for First Year Seminar and First Year Writing at my college as much as I did to write. No. That’s a lie. I did so much more writing. That was the problem. I was addicted to writing, I needed writing, all I desired was a small niche and a vibrant fan community to see my work and talk about it, or at the very least to understand what made things...

* * *

 

All of that isn’t a good thing, and I’m aware of how pretentious it sounds.

My name’s Olivia Peridot Williams, and I write. A lot. Probably too much. No, definitely too much. I was going to write an essay, as I looked at that empty Google Doc. Not an essay for First Year Writing, or First Year Seminar. I was going to instead write an essay for myself, about fanfic. I don’t think I knew fully what I was going to express, and I knew that I had to get some idea of what I was trying to say.

‘Dear Internet: My name is Olivia Peridot Williams, and I’m drained’? ‘Dear Internet: My name is Olivia Peridot Williams, and I don’t know what you want from me?’

I don’t know. I should probably give some context though, so you can understand all of this. Fuck. My name is Olivia Peridot Williams. I like Peridot. I was born in 1998, on May 9th. I’m probably going to major in creative writing or engineering. I’m not sure. Creative writing if that’ll actually let me find a job, engineering as a more practical fallback. I started writing fanfiction in high school. Junior year. I did nothing but write fics on and off for OpenSourceArchive, barely keeping my grades up. All but a few for one fandom. Color War, a machinima based on the Halo games. Like five or six were Camp Pining Hearts (CPH), but one was a CPH/CW crossover, so.... Anyway, then I had an idea. I’d met my current best friend doing internet text roleplaying for Color War, Amethyst, and she and I began to hash out on a Google Doc for a Color War AU where, essentially, everything was different. All of the characters  were radically different, a few parts were funny and light, a lot of it was very dark... Amethyst was never really great at finishing projects sometimes when she had less of an interest in them, and I can be a bit manic about these things, so I started to do more and more of the work.

We called the first iteration Palette Swap, and tried to make a podcast out of it. That was a big failure. Second iteration, a recorded and much darker series of monologues under a new name. At the time I thought we were going to make something great. Everyone was going to love it. Christ, I was such a fucking idiot. Stupid clod, Peri. Nobody cared. Finally, I half-gave up and began working on a side project based on this thing, to get interest in the monologues. I called it Mission North, after one of the characters, North, and got through 91 chapters, time travel shenanigans, dozens of characters, and one person’s very temporary interest to find that I’d honed my writing skill greatly, and that nobody gave a flying fuck.

At around the same time I wrote a series of bullshit myths that I basically pulled out of my ass, since they were easy to write, based on CPH characters. It was a ‘What if CPH’s characters were deities' thing, and honestly I’m annoyed that it became one of the only things I’ve ever written to achieve any kind of recognition, and when I started to really have fun with it and do my own thing that died.

The joke here is that I thought people would even care, mostly about Mission North, my baby. This is the internet, Peridot. I kept writing, though, because by this point I actually couldn’t stop. Between hypomanic states, pure-obsessional OCD, and good-old-fashioned habit, I physically could not stop writing, desperately trying to find something that people would care about. Okay, maybe it’s kind of selfish to seek gratification in the whims of others, but whatever. Writing’s a long and painful process and you kind of want to, you know, build something out of it. Or, at least I do. Anyway, I did more internet roleplaying and deleted my first account on OSA, hoping to keep myself from writing so I could go back to having a normal life. That failed, since eventually I just made a second account.

Eventually I learned that writing for certain fandoms meant that you could get more interest than others, and that Color War was overshadowed by Camp Pining Hearts. My content for Color War dropped off, and I started writing exclusively for Camp Pining Hearts. I wrote comedies, weird urban fantasy thriller stories, character studies, fake song lyrics. As usual, nobody gave a shit. Well, some people did, but nothing compared to the random bullshit, the shameless, pointless shipping (Paulcy for life), and the porn. I’m getting to a point, trust me. I’m sure that this sounds like Peridot whining about her fucking fanfictions, and yeah, that’s exactly what it is, but bare with me.

I tried to dissect exactly which stories of mine worked, I looked at the more popular ones I saw, and dear God I kept writing, and you know what I figured out? It all means nothing. Okay, that sounded nihilistic and kind of silly. Back up, Peri. Backing up. Anyway, fanfiction serves to generally gratify the interests of whoever’s reading it, to the point where that overshadows actual quality of writing or novelty of storytelling. Not that I’m the best writer in the world, it’s just that I’ve seen Hungarian screenwriters who do this for a living be overshadowed by Paulette fics taking place in fucking supermarkets.

Essentially, I kept writing these weird AUs and shit, or kept trying to...Fuck it. I don’t even know what I’m saying anymore. I don’t think this story’s meant anything, and if it has it’s fucking depressing. My name is Olivia Peridot Williams, the only way I can get anyone who I don’t personally know to see anything I write is via fanfic, my name is Olivia Peridot Williams, fanfiction is a broken mess of a genre that is driving me insane, my name is Olivia Peridot Williams, internet, what the fuck do you want me to write about?

I can’t gratify you, Internet. Not the way others can. I can’t write shipping as a main thing, I can’t tap into whatever the fuck fandom wants today and provide that...I just write stories. God dammit, I just write stories. My name is Olivia Peridot Williams, and I’m going to update my main shit as soon as I can get the energy to.

Why not just start this all over?

Over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over, draining me over a goal I’ll never reach for a prize that I can’t achieve all so that I can validate myself as a fucking writer, so that I can fight the porn, the shameless shipping, and all that other shit. I don’t understand you, fanfiction. I’ve done this for two and a half years now, almost non-stop, produced a novel-length super-AU and over seventy smaller fics between two accounts of varying length and quality, and I. Do. Not. Understand. What. You. All. Want.

This is Olivia Peridot Williams. Expect another story as soon as this routine breakdown ends. After all, it happens every month or so.

  
Is writing fanfiction supposed to be this soul-grinding?


End file.
